Our Backyard Bee Journey!💗🐝

[drstratton]

Cool!

I'm sorry we put a deep box on as a honey super. I really wish we'd put on a medium. But we had the deep ready to go, and had more frames with comb.

Thank goodness we have 8 frame boxes. Deeps get heavy!

Are they not capping it yet or just not getting them filled? I'm trying to remember, how many years have you had bees? Is this your 2nd?

We run 8 frame boxes also. It will be so much better next year when we have frames with comb on it already.

 

[Sally PB]

This is the third summer. We got bees in May of 2023. This was our first harvest of honey!

We gave them the same frames back after harvesting. We figured they'd like the honey and clean up the mess I made cutting off the caps with a serrated knife.

There is a phrase we'd heard at the bee club that we didn't understand at the time:
The Queen is the Queen, but comb is King.

Yeah. Last year, we had some new frames in one of the hives, and there was just nothing going on. We also didn't know the depth of the dearth we were going through, and didn't know to feed them syrup to help them draw new comb.

We're going to be checking them in about a week, and I think we'll have some more honey to harvest.

 

[drstratton]

This is the third summer. We got bees in May of 2023. This was our first harvest of honey!

We gave them the same frames back after harvesting. We figured they'd like the honey and clean up the mess I made cutting off the caps with a serrated knife.

There is a phrase we'd heard at the bee club that we didn't understand at the time:
The Queen is the Queen, but comb is King.

Yeah. Last year, we had some new frames in one of the hives, and there was just nothing going on. We also didn't know the depth of the dearth we were going through, and didn't know to feed them syrup to help them draw new comb.

We're going to be checking them in about a week, and I think we'll have some more honey to harvest.

We've been feeding all but one of our hives. Well, we fed them all until it was time to put the supers on. I wanted one hive without any sugar syrup in it. That's the honey we're gifting to our friends.
We are in our dearth now and are feeding all of the hives. We want them to continue building comb and want to keep them strong. So we'll feed them sugar syrup with pollen in it. I might also make some pollen patties. We will possibly stop feeding if we get a good nectar flow from buckwheat. I'm hoping to keep the queens laying through October. Hopefully we will have helped build them up with a strong winter physiology. We will be using a candy board once the overnight temps drop below 50°F. Watched a good video from Bob Binnie on a study about feeding with sugar syrup being better than feeding them honey. It was very surprising to us.

Yay honey. It's amazing that bees will store so much more than they'll ever use. I can't wait to see how much you get!

 

[Sally PB]

We got this much:

10 quart jars. They hold a quart if filled to the rim, so this isn't really 10 quarts. The bucket of strained honey weighed 36 pounds.

 

[drstratton]

We got this much:
View attachment 4180515
10 quart jars. They hold a quart if filled to the rim, so this isn't really 10 quarts. The bucket of strained honey weighed 36 pounds.

Very nice! Hopefully you'll get a good amount next week too!

 

[Sally PB]

Thanks!

 

[N F C]

We got this much:
View attachment 4180515
10 quart jars. They hold a quart if filled to the rim, so this isn't really 10 quarts. The bucket of strained honey weighed 36 pounds.

It looks delicious Sally!

 

[5Australorpasaures]

About 42 lbs from 13 medium frames.

Not bad, not bad at all, we usually average 35-37 lbs per medium. Everything depends on the weather and how it effects the flow.